It Is a Wonderful Life

This week I multi-tasked: as I sewed the little kids and I watched Christmas movies together. Over a couple of days we watched one of my favorites, "It's a Wonderful Life." I love this movie and I want my kids to love it too.

At book club this week the topic of conversation came around to movies. (Let's face it, the book discussion itself occupies only a small part of the evening!) Several people said that they really don't enjoy "It's a Wonderful Life" all that much. I was thinking about this as I watched the movie, wondering what it is that appeals to me. It was interesting to watch from this perspective.

The first thing I realized was that this is not an easy movie to watch. It's black and white, which is never a big selling point. And it has a pretty detailed plot line, which required pausing every few minutes to explain and re-explain what had just happened and why it mattered. The kids were all clustered around the space heater when we started watching. (The playroom, where the sewing machine is, is a very cold room.) At some point I noticed that Rachel had gone to the other end of the room and was huddled on the day bed. As I asked her what was wrong I realized that she was stressed by the tension in the movie and so was distancing herself from it. I held her on my lap for a while and talked about how the movie was going to change and start feeling a lot better in a few minutes, and that made her happier. But much of it really is stressful. I almost cannot watch the scene where Uncle Billy goes into the bank and loses the money--it makes me sick to my stomach.

[On a only slightly related note, I've only seen "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" once. I had to see it for a class at BYU, and I was really looking forward to it. I love Jimmy Stewart and I'd heard such good things about the movie. I thought the movie was amazing, but at the same time I found it so painful to watch that I've never seen it again. So I do understand why Rachel moved away from the tv!]

So--why do I love "It's a Wonderful Life"? It’s not just because it’s a Christmas movie. In fact I don’t think that it is really a Christmas movie, even though it is set in the Christmas season.

What I love that is that it is a story of human goodness. It's a story in which the hero sacrifices his own desires and ambitions for the greater good, over and over again. He makes a life that is beautiful and happy despite the fact that it is not what he had planned. And when he finally reaches his breaking point and wishes that he had never been born, he's shown in explicit detail how much different the world would have been had he never been born. How important his presence in the world had been, even though he had never been able to do the amazing things that he had always dreamed of.

I love this reminder; that even when life doesn’t turn out like we’d imagined it can still be beautiful. And that we are all interconnected and bless each other in ways that we may never understand.

This movie reminds me that I, too, am living a Wonderful Life.

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What is your favorite Christmas movie, and why?